The commercial space business has blossomed over the past decade. Two companies, though, have grabbed the spotlight, emerging as the most ambitious of them all: Blue Origin and SpaceX.
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Sometime in 2019, construction on Vineyard Wind, the first major offshore wind farm in the United States, will begin. Workers will start prepping a pair of undersea substations to be installed about 55 kilometers south of the Massachusetts mainland. A specially equipped trawler will lay undersea transmission cable between the site and a landfall on Cape Cod. The cable will connect to the switching...
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What's the most important thing for people to know about the full-body exoskeleton from Sarcos Robotics, which can turn an assembly-line worker into a superhero? "We're taking orders," says Sarcos CEO Ben Wolff.
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Bitcoin soaks up most of the hype and the opprobrium heaped on cryptocurrencies, leaving its younger and smaller sibling Ethereum in the shadows. But Ethereum is anything but small. Its market capitalization was roughly US $10 billion at press time, and it has an equally whopping energy footprint.
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A COMING MILESTONE in the automobile world is the widespread rollout of Level 4 autonomy, where the car drives itself without supervision. Waymo, the company spun out of Google's self-driving car research, said it would start a commercial Level 4 taxi service by late 2018, although that hadn't happened as of press time. And GM Cruise, in San Francisco, is committed to do the same in 2019, using a ...
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Kenya runs on mobile phones. There are almost 43 million in use by Kenya's nearly 50 million citizens, meaning the East African country has the 33rd highest mobile phone usage in the world. By comparison, it has fewer than 70,000 fixed landlines.
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At a factory on the outskirts of Brandenburg en der Havel, Germany, bunny-suited technicians are manufacturing the future. The shiny, thin squares they're assembling into flat modules promise to outperform the best solar panels on the market.
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In 1714, the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act, which offered serious money to anyone who could devise a practical method to measure longitude at sea. While the determination of longitude might seem a trivial thing in today's world of smartphones and GPS satellites, at the time it was an immense technical challenge. It took many years, but the strategy worked, leading to the development ...
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